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The dream went back more than a decade, to when Jim Joseph got together with a few friends and acquaintances and decided that Sacramento was long overdue for an affordable housing community friendly to LGBTQ elders.
“They’d already been through the ups and downs of coming out as young people, or older, or whatever, and there was a lot of discrimination in low-income housing, and they were having a rough go of it,” said Joseph, who at the time was a member of the West Sacramento Commission on Active Aging. “So, the three of us did our research on nonprofits, and we went to a meeting with the IRS in San Francisco, and then we heard about this person in Sacramento who was involved in affordable housing, and her name was Rachel.”
The “Rachel” in question turned out to be Rachel Iskow, the former CEO of Mutual Housing California, whom Jim Joseph heard about through a mutual banker friend of theirs. Iskow invited Joseph to a 2013 open house for the fledgling New Harmony Mutual Housing Community in Davis, and it was there that he and one of his partners in the early stages of the elder LGBTQ housing idea, Michael Farnham, first met with Rachel face-to-face to establish the synergy that led to the creation of Lavender Courtyard.
This week, Mutual Housing California is celebrating the groundbreaking of the LGBTQ-friendly Lavender Courtyard community that Joseph first envisioned and that Iskow pushed forward. Construction work is now underway at the corner of F and 16th streets in midtown Sacramento, in the Lavender Heights neighborhood where the heart of the city’s LGBTQ community beats strongest.
“I could say that the beginning of construction of Lavender Courtyard is beyond our wildest imagination, but it’s not,” said Mutual Housing’s current CEO, Roberto Jiménez. “Thanks to the partnership that Jim and Rachel formed, and the ongoing efforts of so many others, both local and national – the Lavender Leadership Team, architects and elected officials, the Weinberg Foundation, SAGE, Enterprise and Mutual’s own housing and community development teams, not to mention all of the ordinary folks who regularly call and email us who say they need this housing. They’ve kept us energized over the long haul – they and we have turned our wildest imagination into a living, breathing community. We never lost sight of our goal, and now we know that Lavender Courtyard will soon stand as a source of pride for this neighborhood, the city, this region and certainly for Mutual Housing. And hopefully it inspires others to know that LGBTQ-affirming housing can be built outside of a major American metropolis – and be welcomed into the community.”
Documentation has shown that throughout American society, LGBTQ elders have suffered discrimination and abuse, as well as social isolation, when the circumstances of their lives force them into senior living communities. Oftentimes they are forced back into the closet with their sexual orientation, despite having been the vanguard generation of the international pride movement.
From the time of their first meeting at New Harmony, Joseph and Iskow planned for a development that would ensure a safe and stable community landing point for LGBTQ seniors in this critical juncture of their lives, one that was close to public transportation corridors and social services that would meet their needs.
Iskow, who led Mutual Housing as CEO almost from its inception in 1988 until her retirement at the end of 2017, said that the location could not have been more critical to the project’s success.
“We were determined to find something in Lavender Heights, where many LGBT seniors live, socialize, and get services,” she said. “It was and is the center of LGBT social activity, and we know that social interaction is critical for seniors. Your life expectancy has a lot to do with your social relationships, and the number and depth of your social relationships. What we were seeing, and what the gay community was seeing in Sacramento, was that with the increased rents in midtown, a lot of LGBT seniors were being displaced from the neighborhood.”
Iskow and Joseph clicked immediately into a working friendship that produced a housing plan that they presented to the Mutual Housing Board of Directors. Once the panel lent its support to the idea, the two of them got together with some Mogavero Architects and went hunting for land. They found the parcel at 16th and F, once the site of a Sambo’s Restaurant that was torn down in the 1980s, long after the old U.S. 40 highway that ran through Sacramento gave way to the interstates.
“I think I was driving around and spotted it,” Joseph said of the vacant lot at 16th and F. “We went out and looked at it, took it to the board, and we made an offer. It’s been six years.”
Noting the racist imagery associated with the Sambo’s restaurant chain, Iskow described the transformation of the parcel as going “from discrimination to liberation.”
“It was a courageous leap of faith on the part of the board to go ahead and approve the purchasing of that expensive parcel prior to having any substantial financing commitments,” Iskow said. “And they did it because they understood the importance of having LGBT-welcoming affordable senior housing in that neighborhood. They believed in the future of that neighborhood.”
Before Mutual Housing came into the picture, Joseph had formed a nonprofit with his original partners that they called Sacramento Rainbow Village. Initially, the group envisioned a community center for the LGBTQ community that would include a housing component. When Mutual Housing was brought into the project, some of the original board members split off to pursue their own goal of building a community center. Meanwhile, Joseph, Iskow, Farnham, a Lavender Heights businessman, and Jay Hyde, an associate at Mogavero Architects, which is also located in Lavender Heights, pushed ahead on the housing alternative.
“We’d been courting Mutual, and wanted to work with them, and this sort of blended into a wonderful opportunity for us and I hope for Mutual,” Hyde said. “And it wouldn’t have happened at all without Rachel.”
Once the land was acquired, Joseph and Iskow, along with the housing and community organizing teams at Mutual Housing, went on the hunt for the political and financial support to get the project off the ground. Their first stop in 2014 was at Sacramento City Hall, where the advocates found a friend in City Council member Steve Hansen, Sacramento’s first openly-LGBT council member, who lives near the Lavender Courtyard site and who represents Lavender Heights. Hansen introduced Joseph and Iskow to the neighborhood association leaders, and the Mutual Housing team made calls and dropped in on community organizations and business leaders who provided the crucial support needed to jump-start the campaign to create Sacramento’s first LGBTQ-friendly elder living community.
“I remember when Rachel and Jim and his other partners first came in and told me of their idea and that they had put some earnest money down on the site for potential development,” Hansen said in an interview. “I was all in.”
Even though the Lavender Heights neighborhood stands as one of the most progressive in the city, a small but vociferous group of neighborhood residents launched a campaign against the project. Hansen invited the opponents into his office for a discussion, but it quickly turned ugly, he said, and he wound up kicking them out.
“They told me how inappropriate it was to put LGBT seniors across the street from an elementary school,” Hansen recalled. “They said, ‘Of course, these people don’t have kids.’ I knew what they meant, and I couldn’t tolerate the implications of that kind of comment. Also, we had a movie night at the elementary school to galvanize support for the project, and they decided to come and harass us. That really galvanized support for us, because the opponents were so atrocious.”
When it came time in 2016 for the City Council to vote on whether to lend financial support to the project, Iskow worked with the community organizing team at Mutual Housing. The result was a packed City Council chambers, with hundreds of supporters who wore lavender hearts pinned on their chests. They overwhelmed the opponents, who numbered fewer than 20, and the council approved Lavender Courtyard on a unanimous 9-0 vote.
“We filled the City Hall chambers with supportive residents, senior organizations, community organizations, environmental and equity activists, and housing advocates, the whole realm, service organizations that had seen the discrimination against LGBT people,” Iskow said. “Then, we went to work to fund the development.”
The City Council’s approval included $1.9 million in federal funds to get the project started. With that stipend in hand, Mutual Housing embarked on a four-year effort to procure the $17.9 million in construction costs and $27.3 million in overall project costs that it would take to build the 53-unit Lavender Courtyard community. Iskow led the initial effort to find the money, along with Director of Acquisitions Keith Bloom, before Director of Housing Development Holly Wunder Stiles took charge of the financing operation after Iskow’s retirement.
Like it does with almost all affordable housing communities, the financing end of the project took on the look of a Rube Goldberg contraption – complicated, with each intricate funding lever connected to the next. The key financing commitments combined state and federal tax credits that account for approximately 37 percent of the Lavender project’s total with multiple forms of essential “soft” money components such as loans and grants from government agencies and private foundations.
The Fall of 2018 turned into a big season for Lavender Courtyard when it came to applying for and receiving the soft-money subsidies.
“Before you can apply for the tax credits, you have to raise the rest from somewhere else,” Wunder Stiles said. “It is really the soft, subsidy money that makes the deals work. The city only had limited resources that they could give us, so luckily we were talking right about that time to an interested tax-credit investor, Enterprise Community Partners, who put us in touch with the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation for a $2.5 million grant, and that was huge.”
The Weinberg Foundation, which looks to fund affordable housing programs for older adults, came through with its grant for Lavender Courtyard in October 2018.
Early the next month, on Election Day, the voters of California approved two housing bonds that provided billions of dollars for affordable housing construction. Mutual Housing applied for funds under the Proposition 1 Multifamily Housing Program, and the approval from the state Department of Housing and Community Development came through in December 2019.
“It was seriously competitive,” Wunder Stiles said of the Proposition 1 money. “There was so much pent-up demand. There hadn’t been any money for affordable housing from anywhere for a decade, and everybody came in on the MHP application.”
Mutual Housing also benefited from additional state tax credit money that Gov. Gavin Newsom included in his first, 2019-2020 budget, that served as a supplement to the federal tax credit funds for which Mutual Housing applied in January 2020.
The tax credit application, together with an application for a bond allocation used to make a tax-exempt construction loan, were both approved this past April, to complete the financing package that would allow Mutual Housing to commence construction of Lavender Courtyard. An additional $520,000 soft loan from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco’s Affordable Housing Program, secured through Sacramento FHLB member Farmers & Merchants Bank, ensured the project would be feasible despite the cost impacts of COVID.
“It’s almost kind of surreal that we’re even at this point,” Joseph said. “It’s been a long road – nine, 10, 11 for me. So, yeah, I am excited. I think it’s going to be a real healthy and exciting place to live.”
Project Manager Adrienne Gemheart and construction partner Sunseri Construction discuss the early stages of construction, which began October 5, 2020.
This story is part of a week-long virtual celebration of breaking ground on Mutual Housing at Lavender Courtyard. Follow along on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for highlights about our newest inclusive community throughout #LavenderWeek.
A virtual groundbreaking event is scheduled for Thursday, October 29, at 10:30AM. Click here to view.
To learn more about Lavender Courtyard by Mutual Housing visit our website at www.mutualhousing.com/lavendercourtyard.